What makes combat encounters hard to scale? Who trains new characters?

James Trotta

Spellsword
Diversity Committee
People suggesting level caps have said that level disparity makes combat hard to scale.

I think levels are probably one of the easiest things to overcome when scaling an encounter.

I think a few things have a much bigger impact: magic items, monster abilities, OOG individual skill, and teamwork.

I don't think a level cap would be a solution. I think the best solution would be to reward experienced players for helping new players improve combat skills and teamwork. Then getting rid of golems would be the next most effective. Limiting magic item use and possibly high magic cloaks & banes would be third on my list.

Are levels really the issue? What else makes combat hard to scale?
 
The reason levels are hard to scale is because you can have a group of 10 players, all different levels, and end up posing too much of a threat for some and no threat to others, just with card abilities in play. I have seen this on major town battles all the time. You scale the cards for middle of the road, but the lowbies are ineffective and the highbies just roll them. This is without magic items. I have seen players just using character card abilities be in these situations.

Yes, magic items blow it more out of proportion, but levels are the basis of all of it.
 
Player intelligence. Pcs can be too blind and fail hard, or, more often, pull some brilliance out of their tails that causes plot to double face palm.
 
Varying levels of PC agency is the only thing that makes encounters hard to scale.
 
Stonegolem, I can read your statement a couple of different ways. What do you mean by agency in this case?
 
One thing that makes the encounters hard to scale is also the variety of skills PCS may have. It could turn out that a whole group of PC goes trough a mod and they require a skill none of them has.

There could be a part of the group that has skills that are useless in a mod. For example Alchemists in the group and their alchemy has no affect any of the monsters they are facing.

There are many ways a mod could go wrong and sometimes as Inaryn wrote sometimes it is just people making mistakes whether it is plot or the PCs.
 
Last edited:
I gave it some cursory thought and was unable to come up with a situation in which the agency, or ability of PCs to perform, was not roughly identical was not the reason that scaling an encounter was difficult.

In our game, disparity comes in three categories: mechanical, social, and physical. Mechanical differences can include level, ritual wealth, and skill set diversity. Social differences can include PC to NPC interactions (a knight or a knave) or PC to PC interactions (a team member or a loner). Physical differences are most often related to athleticism.

When all of those things are roughly equal, scaling encounters is easy, because you are essentially writing for one person with six or fifty heads. The larger the standard deviation, the more difficult it is to effectively engage every single person involved in the encounter.
 
I agree with everything you've said Stonegolem. Although I have found I do not have as great a difficulty in scaling for social or physical disparity as the mechanical ones. The social ones I actually mostly let play out in game and so don't scale for them at all. Physical differences I compensate for by trying to match physicality/athleticism of NPC player to PC player. Doesn't always work, but it's close enough. It's the mechanical differences that I find the most thorny to handle.
 
Are levels really the issue? What else makes combat hard to scale?
Yes. If your big fighter is swinging an unlimited number of flamebolts, or your big rogue is swinging an unlimited number of lightning storms (sans magic items), and they're alongside 3rd - 10th level gals, there's bound to be issues in scaling. If your big scholar 81 lightning bolts in addition to their 81 additional spells, and they're playing alongside the cat that throws four spells and is tapped for the day, there's going to be an issue in scaling.
 
I agree with this depending on the situation.
Yes. If your big fighter is swinging an unlimited number of flamebolts, or your big rogue is swinging an unlimited number of lightning storms (sans magic items), and they're alongside 3rd - 10th level gals, there's bound to be issues in scaling. If your big scholar 81 lightning bolts in addition to their 81 additional spells, and they're playing alongside the cat that throws four spells and is tapped for the day, there's going to be an issue in scaling.
If big fighter and little fighter are working together as a team and big fighter is giving little fighter instructions to make sure that little fighter does something useful in combat, then I think scaling should be easy. Little fighter should have fun.

If big fighter just wants to get the NPC treasure before little fighter then it may be hard to make sure little fighter has fun. That's why I think encouraging well organized teams / more experienced / more skilled players to IG coach new players is the key to this whole scaling thing.

The low level scholar running out of spells is certainly a problem. I personally would never play a 15 build (or similar) scholar.
 
The low level scholar running out of spells is certainly a problem. I personally would never play a 15 build (or similar) scholar.

All hail BonkStaff the mighty! XD
 
The total number of factors that makes combat hard to scale is so high that I'm not sure I could list them all if I tried. But let me try to pare them down to the big ones.

Available PC resources - The closer you are to the end of a logistics period, the harder it is to know what resources the PCs have available. In monster camp, we often try to count life spells (roughly) and use that as a metric for other resources, but it is a weak metric at best. For any given encounter, you are pretty much all but guessing how many defenses are available, how much curing is available, how much offense is available, and even how many PCs will engage it (except in a module). I've seen a wave battle that appeared underscaled on paper cause multiple deaths because nobody realized that the two biggest PC teams in town had left site for breakfast.

Effects that scale poorly - Is shatter a powerful effect? That entirely depends on whether the PCs that face it are level 3 or level 15. For the former, shatter is close in power to a death spell. For the latter, disarm is generally more powerful. Similarly, how deadly is drain on a carrier attack. On 1 or 2 enemies, usually not a big deal. But on 4 or 5, it can suddenly be a TPK. And the tipping point is incredibly sudden (and hard to judge), especially if there is a mix of other enemies in the battle. To put it simply, there are a number of effects in the game that don't scale consistently. It takes experience and, honestly, a little guesswork, to work with them.

NPC Fatigue - In my experience, the two deadliest moments in the game are shortly after game on and when PCs jump fence. The main reason for this is that those are situations when you have NPCs that are most fresh. Sure, PCs tire over the weekend, too, but not at the same rate. An influx of new NPCs that show up Saturday morning (because they couldn't get out to game Friday night) can easily tip the scales much more than you might expect.

Level Disparity - I am including this one last because I think it has the least effect on scaling difficulty (though still has a notable effect) of the things I listed. Level disparity primarily makes defensive effects like Threshold and <damage type> to hit a problem. It also changes the significance of Body values. For some types of enemies that have really low body (like plants), level disparity isn't that big a deal. It also doesn't affect enemies with carrier attacks much (a 1st level PC and a 5oth level PC can both wear the same maximum armor value). But, for something like a Colossal Juggernaut (huge health, 1/2 damage from weapons, moderate damage), level disparity is a major pain in the butt. Usually the only way to deal with level disparity is including a range of enemies and giving NPCs very good instructions (and that only helps so much).


The first two issues, in my opinion, are the biggest. In fact, I listed them as broad categories, but the truth is that they involve lots of very specific problems that combine in very ugly ways. For any scaling, the more you can decrease the variables involved, the easier it is to scale. But other than modules (where the PC count variable can be set in stone), there are simply a lot of variable that are almost impossible to do more than estimate.

-MS
 
If big fighter and little fighter are working together as a team and big fighter is giving little fighter instructions to make sure that little fighter does something useful in combat, then I think scaling should be easy. Little fighter should have fun.
I would generally think that scaling for social cohesion is even harder than scaling for level disparity.
 
I would generally think that scaling for social cohesion is even harder than scaling for level disparity.

Impossible, really. You can't assume how characters/players will act socially with each other. Some characters make great teachers, some players hate teaching and won't teach at all. Some players play tough characters who expect new characters to prove their worth; this can be intimidating to new players, much less their characters.
 
I called it teamwork but social cohesion is not entirely different. Anyway I agree that scaling for social cohesion is harder than scaling for levels. I think levels are easy to scale for compared to everything on my list.
I would generally think that scaling for social cohesion is even harder than scaling for level disparity.

On wandering monsters and wave battles, scaling for teamwork is hard. Lack of teamwork is a main source for characters rezzing. When I play solo, every time I go down I know I might rez. Someone might pick me up with a heal. Someone might say I'm stabilized and leave me to bleed. Maybe no one will notice or care that I went down. That's fine. I have been playing a while and I know what I'm getting into.

For new players, it's not so fine. If new players rezzing is a problem, one possible solution is to encourage experienced players to teach the new players teamwork and look out for them in the process. That's one of the ideas in http://alliancelarp.com/forum/threa...h-level-players-contribute-to-the-game.31029/

When I'm with my team, I know I only rez if we all get rolled. How do you challenge the experienced team and the new player with no team / limited combat skills at the same time?

Impossible, really. You can't assume how characters/players will act socially with each other. Some characters make great teachers, some players hate teaching and won't teach at all. Some players play tough characters who expect new characters to prove their worth; this can be intimidating to new players, much less their characters.

I agree that you can't assume players will work together / teach each other. At my last event, there was one team there (4 people). Maybe another team of 2. Maybe a couple other people who knew each other and kind of worked together. On Friday night, one team member said maybe since we're staying in the same cabin we'll roll together this weekend. His teammates called that guy over and a minute later they decided we would not be working together because they did not want to pool treasure and reduce their profit for the weekend.

I suppose that reason could have been a lie, but either way you have the experienced players who work as a team keeping to themselves. And they have a buttload of magic items / monster abilities. How do you challenge the team AND the players who have fewer items, are not a team, and are not golems? How much would a level cap help?
 
I really like the three sources of disparity Stonegolem cited, and it is very much how I view designing encounters from a plot standpoint and creating mod parties from a PC standpoint. That said, lack of social ability, where someone gets left to die should cause people to die at times. Yeah, there is a point of bullying...and trust me, been there...but plot should be very careful with how they try to mitigate that.

Athleticism, well I am never really a believer in scaling that. Not from a rules standpoint at least. Sportsmanship is good, but trying to scale properly for this is so utterly objective. I mean I am all for ideals and striving for ideals, just not mandating they be achieved.

Joe S.
 
Back
Top